The title for the sequel to Stealth Inc. is a pun on HBO's Game of Thrones fantasy series. Perhaps that's why NVIDIA published it to the Play Store this week: with the next season starting on Sunday, there's no better chance to capitalize on at least a few dozen people mistakenly putting the wrong search phrase into Google. But underneath its pop culture allusions there's a solid platform-puzzle game, and now it's available for the SHIELD Android TV and SHIELD Tablet (sorry, SHIELD Portable owners... and every other Android user, I guess). It's $10 with no in-app purchases.

The Stealth Inc. series mixes conventional platforming mechanics with a stealth theme: your little bobble-headed hero can stay hidden in shadows and becomes an easy target in the light. If you've ever played Mark of the Ninja (which could really do with a SHIELD version, any day now NVIDIA, kthnxbye), it's a very similar setup. The player character's night vision goggles glow green in the dark and red in the light, easily showing the player whether they're visible or not. Your job is to rescue a bunch of clones from an evil, or at least severely maladjusted, genius. This involves a Metroid-style progression with new tools and puzzles that are gradually opened up.

Stealth Inc. 2 combines a 2D layout with 3D graphics and some stylish effects for a cartoony but surprisingly engaging look. The multifaceted levels can be difficult, but controls are precise, so when you die you have no one else to blame. The price is high by Android standards, but it's actually a bit cheaper than the PC version, which is going for $15 on Steam at the moment.

Comments

Abz Productions

wish they could port these to android phones...........

Kevin Brosseau

You'd have a much worse experience on phones. Let's face it, outside of building a gaming computer, the Shield Android TV is the most powerful set top box around, and the shield tablet is also equally powerful and a lot of focus is put on the GPU which is required here. The rest of the mobile GPU's won't cut it.

Abz Productions

Eh..modern mobile GPUs are pretty damn close or even surpassing the shield tablets GPU. The 820 and Mali T880 are pretty powerful. Also with Vulkan support there should be no excuses.

No they're not. RAW power doesn't mean anything. You want to know why? Overheating. All phones and tablets will reach a specific point where they start throttling and what makes it even funnier - that is usually between 10-20 minutes while playing a game (the more powerful devices tend to be around 10-15 minutes).

What makes the Shield Tablet better? - nVidia added not only vent holes but also a separate metal plate inside the damn thing which takes the heat away from the CPU and spreads it across the whole device (remember how your phone tends to get hot in a specific area? Well, that doesn't happen here).
What does this mean? The Shield Tablet is meant to take much more beating than any other device before it starts throttling (and it does as well, just like all devices).

Anyway, it's about architecture rather than power, the K1 and X1 are build with support for desktop APIs like DirectX and OpenGL (the legit one and ES one), so porting to them would require a LOT more work, which I doubt any dev would go through for the <5000 sales he'll get.

xxTheGoDxx

The Shield isn't the only Android tablet with a good thermal profile (it might be the best though, don't know) and it obviously doesn't support Direct X. Porting from OpenGL to ES depends on what functions the game uses in the first place. If a game is DX only on PC having full OpenGL support doesn't need to mean much and even less when the game in question uses an Android compatible engine like Unreal or Unity.

A lot of Shield exclusive games don't even use normal OpenGL, I have both Hotline Miami and Titan Souls running here on my Galaxy Tab S 8.4 with no problem after sideloading them.

Lets be real here. Those games are Shield exclusive only because Nvidia paid for the port and exclusivity rights.

As for faked compatibility, that has been an issue since Tegra 3 (remember Dead Trigger? How a dual-core Mali-400MP Galaxy S2 could run it the same as a quad-core Tegra 3 Nexus 7 could?). At the end of the day, they pay developers, the vast majority of which wouldn't port the game to Android anyway, so that's their own thing.

Muhahaha. Always funny when people that talk out of their ass accuse others to do the same. The Shield doesn't support Direct X! Why? Because Direct X is an API by Microsoft made for Windows that is only available on Windows. What you posted confirms that the GPU is compatible to Direct X 11 when the device in question runs Windows.

When you do your research, make sure you understand what you are reading, please.

> As for faked compatibility, that has been an issue since Tegra 3
(remember Dead Trigger? How a dual-core Mali-400MP Galaxy S2 could run
it the same as a quad-core Tegra 3 Nexus 7 could?).

I don't know about the Dead Trigger incident (do you speak about those wrappers that enabled Tegra only effects by translating the needed texture formats and faked the hardware identifier?) but the games I mentioned run natively on none Tegra hardware. They don't use none ES OpenGL!

> At the end of the day, they pay developers, the vast majority of which
wouldn't port the game to Android anyway, so that's their own thing.

1 - I was speaking for the GPU, not the OS. If the OS was compatible itself, there would be no need for porting a game.
2 - No wrappers, just falsely marked as non-compatible. Also keep in mind, there is also the issue with Tegra-only games like Half-Life 2 Episode 2 where the game runs on K1 (no mods) yet is exclusive to X1.

It's nVidia, is anyone surprised at the generally bad business decisions by them?

xxTheGoDxx

> I was speaking for the GPU, not the OS.

Than I don't understand why you wrote stuff like this in a discussion about Shield exclusive games not being able to be ported to normal Android phones:

> Anyway, it's about architecture rather than power, the K1 and X1 are
build with support for desktop APIs like DirectX and OpenGL (the legit
one and ES one), so porting to them would require a LOT more work, which
I doubt any dev would go through for the If the OS was compatible itself, there would be no need for porting a game.

If DX was available on Android you would still need to port the game because its not the only API that Windows game are compiled against (ever heard of Win32?). If all Windows API would be available on Android you would still need to port the game because those are compiled for x86 processors instead of ARM...

No offense dude, but please don't tell people to do their research before posting when you are the one that might be wrong.

xxTheGoDxx

> You'd have a much worse experience on phones.

Is something you absolutely can't say w/o knowing how demanding this game is.

xxTheGoDxx

Most of those games actually work on normal Android devices when you can get hold of a DRM free APK. I have both Hotline Miami and Titan Souls running on my Samsung tablet.

In practice the reason why they only get released on Nvidia hardware is because Nvidia paid for the port. Which is a shame, I would love for a market for quality games to exist and would pay above the typical 3 Dollar mobile game price standard for it.